No offense to those working hard to bring wind, solar or geothermal energy to scale, or to people who are jazzed about energy efficiency, but I’m going to end my blogging for 2009 by saying that I am really excited about electric cars. It’s my favorite green technology, and one that’s on the verge of a breakthrough.
The electric car could bring about the biggest transformation of the auto industry since its invention. If all goes well, we will be seeing many more of them on the roads in 2010 and especially 2011.
With thanks to Plug In America, a nonprofit group that promotes plug-in vehicles, which put this list together, here are12 myths about electric cars that, just in time for the 12 days of Christmas. Plug In America began as a group of electric vehicle (EV) drivers, so its members are speaking from experience.
I’m now going to do my best to slow down and stay away from my laptop between Christmas and New Year’s Day–so enjoy your holidays, happy new year and I’ll be back in 2010.
Aptera
1. MYTH: EVs don’t have enough range. You’ll be stranded when you run out of electricity
FACT: Americans drive an average of 40 miles per day, according to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation. Most new BEVs have a range of at least double that and can be charged at any ordinary electrical outlet (120V) or publicly accessible station with a faster charger. The latter, already in use, will proliferate as the plug-in infrastructure is built out. At present, all it takes is planning for EV owners, who can travel up to 120 miles on a single charge, to use their cars on heavy travel days. Alternatively, a PHEV goes at least 300 miles on a combination of electricity and gasoline.
2. Myth: EVs are good for short city trips only
FACT: Consumers have owned and driven EVs for seven years or more and regularly use them for trips of up to 120 miles. [click to continue…]
Not long ago, the only people who could access and analyze satellite images of the earth were government officials, the military, well-equipped scientists and oil, gas and mining companies.
Today, anyone with a computer and Internet connection can access to Google Earth. Since its introduction in 2005, Google Earth has become a powerful tool for scientists, activists and ordinary citizens who want to better understand, monitor and communicate about the environment.
It’s not just westerners either: Tanzanian villagers are working with the Jane Goodall Institute to monitor deforestation and identify chimpanzee habitats and elephant paths. Indigenous tribes in Brazil can map their lands and track illegal logging and mining. All they need are mobile phones equipped with cameras and GPS technology.
What’s more, the technology is getting better all the time. Last week in Copenhagen during the UN climate negotiations, Google Earth announced that it has worked with experts in remote sensing to build a new platform that incorporates satellite images, massive data and online computing power, making it easier, faster and cheaper to analyze forest ecosystems. (See this and this at the google.org blog.) It’s currently being tested by a handful of organizations, but will be rolled out more widely before long. The red spots on map below, for example, show new deforestation in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.
On my way home from Copenhagen, I learned about these new developments from Lilian Pintea, who is the director of conservation science at the Jane Goodall Institute, which is best known for its pioneering research on chimpanzee behavior. We met when we missed a connection in Geneva, so we arranged to have dinner during the layover. [click to continue…]
So the verdict is in on the UN climate negotiations that just wrapped in Copenhagen and it’s all but unanimous:
Carl Pope, Sierra Club: The world’s nations have concluded a historic–if incomplete–agreement to begin tackling global warming. Tonight’s announcement is but a first step and much work remains to be done.
Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council: We have taken a vital first step toward curbing climate change for the sake of our planet, our country and our children…. There’s still more work to be done.
Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund: A lot of hard work remains, but a lot of hard work is finished. The new positive steps taken here…president the U.S Senate and President Obama with a n historic opportunity.
Jonathan Lash, World Resources Institute: “Much more is needed, but today marks a foundation for a global effort to fight climate change.
Elliot Diringer, Pew Center for Global Climate Change: The Copenhagen Accord is an important step forward in the international climate effort…it lays the foundation for a system to hold countries accountable. …Much remains to be negotiated.
Hmm.. I thought the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio or the 1997 Kyoto Protocol or the 2007 Bali Roadmap were first steps. Shouldn’t we be taking the second, third or fourth steps by now? Or, if you prefer the foundation metaphor, shouldn’t we hurry up and build the house, before sea levels rise and storms intensify?
This isn’t to suggest that the 15,000 or 20,000 people who descended on Copenhagen during the last two weeks wasted their time. What is being called the Copenhagen Accord sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. It promises billions of dollars of aid for poor countries. It points the way towards a resolution of the fundamental conflict between U.S. and China over their so-called “common but differentiated” responsibilities to deal with global warming. That’s important–when it comes to climate and the global economy, the G-2 of the U.S. and China tower over the rest of the world. The leaders of Europe, Japan and other countries at the summit were largely left to rubber-stamp the deal, as The Washington Post reported.
The trouble is, none of this is good enough. Nations can now set own emission reduction targets. (Earlier versions of a political agreement being discussed in Copenhagen had called for specific reductions by 2020 and 2050.) It does not set a deadline for signing and binding treaty. (Until fairly recently, that deadline was supposed to be now.) Sure, aid is promised to poor countries, but aside from some token amounts, no one can be sure where the money will come from.
This isn’t a strong deal. It isn’t a weak deal. It’s not a deal at all.
It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Having said that, I understand the thinking behind the first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done analysis coming from the inside the Beltway environmental groups. With the climate debate now shifting from Copenhagen to the U.S. Senate, they need to tread carefully. They can’t be overly critical of President Obama or undecided senators; they need to suggest that something real was accomplished in Copenhagen, to help persuade legislators that the U.S. can enact strong climate regulation without giving a competitive edge to China or India. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club made this argument explicitly, saying: “Now that the rest of the world–including countries like China and India–has made clear that it is willing to take action, the Senate must pass domestic legislation…”
But, again, the rest of the world has not committed to anything.
For a reality check on where we stand, let me refer you to the Climate Scoreboard put together by scientists at MIT, the Sustainability Institute and Ventana Partners, with the support of Nike, Citigroup, Fidelity Investments and others, which uses computer simulations to model the long-term climate impacts of decisions being undertaken today. Please see the Climate Interactive blog for more detail.
Put simply, we’re not going where we need to go.
A big part of the problem here, as Bill McKibben has written eloquently, is that the world’s governments treat climate change as just another political problem–and it’s not.
Think about the health-care agreement reached this weekend. It’s the product of a series of compromises, some of them quite ugly, but it has the support of President Obama and Democrats in Congress because they believe it’s the best they can do, for now. Maybe they’ll come back to “reform” health care again in a few years. It’s a step, even a big step, in the right direction.
This is how politics usually works. It’s incremental. Even on great moral issues like civil rights, governments move piece by piece–first the military was desegregated, then came schools, then voting rights, finally housing and employment bias were barred, if I remember my history right. This approach gives people time to get used to change. It’s the mindset behind first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done.
But incrementalism isn’t going to do the job when it comes to climate change. Every day that goes by when we emit more global warming pollutants into the atmosphere than nature can take out, the job gets harder to do. So a small but inadequate step, even one in the right direction, can actually leave us worse off than before.
One metaphor that helped me understand this is a bathtub: The faucet (industry, transportation, deforestation) is pouring more water in to the tub than the drain (nature’s ability to absorb CO2) can take away, and there’s no way to make the drain any bigger. Just turning down the faucet a little doesn’t help; the water level in the tub can keep rising, albeit not as fast as before. The longer the faucet pours in more water than the drain can take away, the more radically we have to turn it down to stop the tub from overflowing.
McKibben explains it this way:
Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible “with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.
And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble—because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.
Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already. We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.
There’s the argument for Flopenhagen.
As for Hopenhagen, well, I saw a lot of things to get excited about during my week in Copenhagen.
Denmark itself, for one: The nation gets 20% of its energy from wind, it’s rolling out a national system for charging all-electric cars and roughly 55% of the people of Copenhagen ride a bike every day, most to go to work. You won’t be surprised to hear that they are thinner as a group than those of us in the U.S.
Speaking of wind, Tulsi Tanti, the founder of Suzlon Energy, told me that China is the world’s biggest and fastest growing market for win energy. His company is manufacturing turbines in China, and he says the government there is committed in a serious way to clean energy — even if it doesn’t want to be held to absolute limits on emissions.
Finally, the kids. There were thousands of them in Copenhagen. They are committed to organizing to stop climate change, they are smart, they are idealistic, they are not pragmatic and they are not fans of the first-step-much-work-needs-to-done approach. For more, check out 350.org or Avaaz or the Youth Climate Movement.
You know how people say we need to save the earth for our kids? I’m starting to think that it’s the other way round, that they are going to have to save it for us.
On my last night in Copenhagen, I hosted a gala event on behalf of REDD organized by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and the governments of Gabon, Guyana and Papua New Guinea. It was, to be a honest, a long night–more than three hours of speeches and ceremonies, many quite moving but some, again to be honest, repetitive and overlong. This crowd of environmentalists really didn’t need to be told that climate change is bad and forests are good. Come to think of it, I may have said those things myself at one point. Oops.
The point is, we need to find more creative ways to communicate about the climate crisis. One example is the beautiful three-minute film below from Maya Lin, called Unchopping a Tree, which made its public (as opposed to Internet) debut at the event. It grabbed everyone’s attention, and for good reason. (If you click on the arrows at bottom right, you should be able to watch the video in full-screen mode.) If for some reason it doesn’t play well on this blog, you can check it out here or at Maya Lin’s What Is Missing? website which is worth a visit.
It gave me great a deal of pleasure to introduce Maya Lin because, although we’d never met before, I felt connected to her. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which she designed as a 21-year-old undergraduate at Yale–she won a “blind” public design competition–stirred enormous controversy when it opened in 1982 but is the most powerful memorial, and-maybe the most successful piece of public art, that I’ve ever seen. As someone who lives just outside Washington, I’ve visited it many times and it is unfailingly an emotional experience.
Maya Lin calls “What Is Missing?” her last memorial and explains on the website:
Imagine a memorial that exists not as a single, stationary monument but that exists in several mediums and places simultaneously. What Is Missing?, my last memorial, is a multi-sited artwork dedicated to bringing awareness to the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. It will bring attention not just to species that have gone extinct but to things we do not realize we have lost..
Maya Lin's Listening Cone
What Is Missing? is a science-based long-term, ambitious project whose components include permanent sculptures, traveling exhibits and offline and online media. Two examples: Last fall, “Listening Cone,” in which visitors can hear the sounds of extinct species and read about their history, was installed at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. On Earth Day, a five-minute video will debut on MTV’s billboard in Times Square and, presumably, on the network and the Internet as well.
There’s no doubt in my mind that What Is Missing? will engage people in ways that neither the written nor the spoken word can. This is not to take anything away from our speakers last night–they including Jane Goodall, Bianca Jagger, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, Indian wind-power magnate Tulsi Tanti and UN enviro chief Achim Steiner, as well as, very briefly, Frances Beinecke of NRDC, Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy and Carter Robers of WWF. A great lineup, to be sure.
But art and music simply communicate in different ways. We need more art and music about the climate crisis and, perhaps, fewer words.
Speaking of which, I also thoroughly enjoyed our opening and closing musical acts: O-Shen, a singer and musician raised by American parents in Papua New Guinea, opened the show, and the guitarist and singer Baaba Mal of Senegal first hushed the crowd (it was past 11, and people were getting restless) and then entranced everyone. Baaba, by the way, seems to be a really nice guy, as well as a great entertainer.
Here are the credits for the What Is Missing? video:
Hey, I’m kidding. This is actually a very cool T-shirt, albeit not suitable for December in Copenhagen, where it was snowing heavily this morning. (That didn’t stop the bike commuters.) The T-shirt is a limited edition, designed by Vivienne Westwood and Anvil Knitwear, to support the efforts of rainforest nations at the climate change negotiations here. [click to continue…]
Shai is the founder and CEO of Better Place, the audacious electric car startup based in Palo Alto, CA, that not only wants to change the way cars are powered but the way they are sold.
Here’s his offer: Pay about $12,000 for a family-sized all-electric sedan made by Renault, known as the Fluence EV. Drive as much as you want. Pay $300 a month for all the electricity you need (or less if you drive fewer miles). Emit no CO2 or other pollutants. And help the world break its addiction to oil.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
There’s just one catch: To get the deal, at least anytime soon, you’ll have to move to Denmark or Israel–where Better Place plans to launch in 2011.
The all-electric Renault Fluence EV
Yesterday afternoon, I took a ride in the Renault Fluence EV and sat down with Shai in Copenhagen, where Renault and Better Place have teamed up to offer test drives for the first time. Since Shai unveiled Better Place early in 2007, auto industry insiders have scoffed at his plans. He’s a Silicon Valley guy, a former hotshot at software giant SAP, with no auto industry experience. A 41-year-old Israel-born enterpreneur, he has a lot of chutzpah and he can come across as glib. Skeptics say Better Place, like much of the electric car industry, is deliver more talk than action.
But guess what? Better Place is starting to look very real. It’s also starting to look like a big missed opportunity for the American automakers.
Better Place has already placed an order for 100,000 cars with Renault. Agassi plans to order another 100,000 cars in the first half of 2012.
I won’t explain the Better Place business model here except to say that the company is a service provider, akin to a mobile phone company. Just as mobile phone companies discount their hardware and make money by selling minutes after building a network of towers, Better Place will build out a network infrastructure of charging stations and battery-switching facilities for its cars, sell the cars at or below cost and then make money by selling electricity. You will own the car, they will own and maintain the battery. Watch the video below if this is the first time you are reading about the company.
The economic model works, at least in theory, because electric cars are fundamentally more efficient and cheaper to operate than gas-powered ones. It works especially well in Europe where gas is heavily taxed and costs at least $7 a gallon. And it works best of all in Denmark, which imposes a whopping 200% taxes on new cars–so a car that retails for $20,000 sells for $60,000—that is waived for electric cars.
Denmark is also a good match for electric cars because so much of its electricity comes from renewable sources. As The New York Times recently reported:
Dong Energy, Better Place’s partner and the biggest utility in Denmark, wants to power the anticipated fleet of electric cars with wind energy, which already supplies nearly 20 percent of the country’s power.
With Better Place and the smart grid working together, cars would charge up as the winds blow at night, when power demand is lowest. Charging would soak up the utility’s extra power and sharply shrink the carbon footprint of electric vehicles.
Better Place is also rolling out rapidly in Israel — which wants to get its economy off oil for obvious reasons, and would love to see the rest of the world do the same. Agassi has agreements with governments to roll out Better Place in northern California, in the urban regions of Australia and in Hawaii. France, too, has made a major commitment to electric vehicles, one reason why Renault says it will launch four electric car models in the next several years.
Shai Agassi
Government backing for electric cars is crucial, just as government policy was needed to unleash private capital to create the Internet industry and mobile telephony. Today, Israeli President Shimon Peres was scheduled to hold a news conference today in Copenhagen to promote Better Place.
“What we’ve seen in Israel is that the president of the country wanted to get it done,” Agassi said. “In Denmark, the minister of climate, Connie Hedegaard, said let’s move forward, and they did.”
By contrast, Agassi has run into dead ends in Detroit and Washington.
“Most car companies looked at us an anomaly,” he says. “Not a competitor. Nor an ally. Because we’re not a car company and we’re not a supplier. In the car industry you’re either a supplier or competitor. We’re an enabler, but it’s an industry that did not have enablers.”
Besides, automakers had other things to worry about. “Most of these companies have gone through a massive, massive change,” Agassi says. “Some of them have changed CEOs. Some of them have changed CEOs twice. Most of them have government cash infusions.”
Still, he notes that Chrysler dropped its plans for an electric when it restructured after getting government aid. “How is that good for the taxpayer,” he asks.
Agassi says the cost of building a network of charging stations and battery-switching facilities comes to no more than between $40 and $75 a car.
“At a cost of $40 per car in our country, we can get off oil,” he says. “It’s a crime not to do it.”
Below are photos from Renault of the Fluence and the Kangoo, an electric van, as well as a couple of photos I took of a cute little single-seat EV for urban driving called the Twizy. Below the photos is the explanatory video about Better Place.
That’s Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola, on the right. On the left is a polar bear. They got together about six weeks ago in Churchill, Manitoba, the polar bear capital of the world, where Kent traveled for a couple of reasons–to run with the Olympic torch as it made its way across the remotest parts of north Canada and to see first-hand the impact of climate change. No roads lead to Churchill, which is a port on Hudson Bay–you have to get there by plane or train. Another fun fact about Churchill–the newspaper there, the Hudson Bay Post, comes out once or a month, or less, depending on the news.
Anyway, I caught up with Muhtar Kent over the weekend in Copenhagen, where he was one of the very few Fortune 500 CEOs to show up in an effort to influence the climate negotiations unfolding here. Give him credit for that. (The only other CEO of a big U.S. company that I ran into here was Jim Rogers from Duke Energy.) Kent has spoken in favor of a global climate treaty and, more importantly, since becoming CEO of Coca-Cola last year, he has strongly supported the company’s sustainability initiatives–around climate, packaging and especially water.
Polar bears have been featured in Coca-Cola’s holiday advertising for nearly a century. Last month, Muhtar Kent, the company’s CEO, traveled to the Arctic to see the furry creatures up close.
It must have been cold up there, I remarked.
“Not cold enough,” replied Kent, who has emerged as a prominent corporate advocate for a global treaty to curb climate change.
“There were a lot of hungry polar bears waiting for the ice,” he said. “They were coming out of hibernation, they’d been on land for months, and they can’t feed unless they are on ice. The ice was late in forming, and we saw that with our own eyes.”
Kent sat down with Fortune in Copenhagen, where he spent the weekend. He was one of a handful of Fortune 500 CEOs to come to Denmark to throw his support behind a global agreement to regulate carbon emissions.
“It is absolutely imperative that our commitment to a low-carbon future be fully understood,” Kent said. “We’re here to lend a Coca-Cola voice to the public and political debate on getting to a fair framework, an inclusive framework, an effective framework so that we can achieve climate protection.”
We go on to talk about Coca-Cola’s sustainability work, which has a wide scope and is not cheap. The company has spent more than $50 million just researching climate-friendly refrigeration. You can read the rest of the story here.
Lord Kelvin said it more than a century ago: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve.”
Today, it’s become a business cliche: “What you don’t measure you can’t manage.”
In that light, and against the backdrop of the UN climate negotiations unfolding here in Copenhagen, Google, GE, The Climate Group and NRDC came together to call on governments around the world to provide people with real-time information on their home energy use.
Simply getting useful and timely information (as opposed to a monthly bill) about their electricity usage drives people to curb usage and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 5 to 15%, the companies said and studies show. When their usage is compared to their neighbors’, they cut back even more.
“This simple but bold call to action makes common sense,” said Steve Fludder, who oversees GE’s EcoMagination efforts.
The technology to deliver real-time information about electricity consumption — essentially, a meter and software — exists today and it’s not expensive.
GE makes so-called smart meters that it sells to electric utilities. It is also developing a wireless home energy monitor to be sold to consumers that will measure electricity usage, let consumers know which gadgets or appliances are using power, and communicate with so-called smart appliances so that dishwashers or dryers can run during times of the day when electricity is cheaper. All this is part of the smart grid and smart home you’ve probably heard about. [click to continue…]
Some people had to wait for a very, very long time to register for the UN climate talks at the Bella Center in Copenhagen where the meetings are being held. The Danes are very democratic so VIPs stood in line with the rest of us. I ran into Frances Beinecke, president of The Natural Resources Defense Council. Temperatures were in the 30s, and tempers were rising.
The UN did not enhance its reputation for efficiency or crowd control today.
Frances and NRDC founder John Adams ended up waited for eight hours, according to her blog, where she wrote:
Little matter. After three decades at the climate change ramparts, I figured, what was another eight hours at the Danish barricades?
An insider told me later that the only thing that made the long wait bearable was that Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense was waiting behind them in line.
In Amazonas, Brazil’s largest state, children and adults are going to school for the first time, families are paid $25 a month and startup businesses and community organizations are getting funded. The money comes from the state government and corporations including Marriott International, two Brazilian banks, Bradesco and Banco de Planeta, and Coca-Cola’s bottler in Brazil.
In return, the Amazon dwellers simply agree not to cut down trees.
This deal—in which companies and governments pay people who pledge not to destroy rainforests—is the essence of a concept known as REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.
REDD is an important element of the UN climate negotiations unfolding this week here in Copenhagen, as well as a vital – and potentially controversial – plank of the climate bills pending in Congress.
“We will only win this deforestation battle if we can find ways to make the forest worth more standing that they are when cut down,” says Virgilio Viana, direct of Fundacao Amazonas Sustentavel, which oversees the project in the Juma Preserve of the Amazon. Juma is a 1.8 million acre region—about the size of Delaware—which is 98% forested. [click to continue…]
So the verdict is in on the UN climate negotiations that just wrapped in Copenhagen and it’s all but unanimous:
In Amazonas, Brazil’s largest state, children and adults are going to school for the first time, families are paid $25 a month and startup businesses and community organizations are getting funded. The money comes from the state government and corporations including Marriott International, two Brazilian banks, Bradesco and Banco de Planeta, and Coca-Cola’s bottler in Brazil.
